Occasionally, when playing to my HomePod 1 Stereo Pair via Tidal (haven’t tested other sources), the two speakers will “de-sync” causing dissonance and drift (music sounds bad). Pausing / Un-Pausing seems to help.
Describe your network setup
Mikrotik router + access points. Roon server plugged in to router. HomePod 1 are on dedicated 5GHz network with good signal strength.
Common issue and was partially bad with iOS18, I’m sure there’s a topic on here about it. I would try the following:
Unpair the two HomePods
Restart both HomePods in home app
Re-pair as stereo pair
Update to OS26
If that hasn’t worked try:
Factory reset both HomePods, leave plug out for 10 seconds
Setup and add to home/room
Re-pair as stereo pair
Update to OS26
Another setting to look at is: which WiFi connection band each HomePod is using. If they were initially set up separately, 2.4ghz for one, and the 5ghz connection band with the other. This can be checked in the HomePod settings. Remember: they use the settings from your phone to setup, so make sure you’re on the same WiFi.
Thanks for the advice. I’m on latest iOS for my personal devices and firmware for homepods (Apple shipped an update just last week). Though, I’m not sure what the iOS version of my iPhone has to do with a connection between a Linux server and two HomePods… What’s the thinking there?
They’re both on the same wifi network, and the same hotspot on that network (I can tell, this hotspot has a unique SSID).
I’ve tried the reset/restart/unplug dance a few times.
I’m hoping Roon can help me get some diagnostics to track what’s happening between my Roon server and my Homepods. Is there a way to enable and see more detailed logs for the server?
When I last used an Apple TV with a pair of HomePods (as the audio output), Roon would play to the Apple TV using airplay, but no audio from the HomePods. This is because the ATV sends the audio via airplay to the HomePods.
Unless recent updates have gotten around that, it’ll never work. I don’t have any ATVs to test this with now. My work around was to use a second ATV connected to the same TV and using ARC (audio return channel) in the TV. Play to the standalone ATV and have the ATV paired with HomePods connected to the ARC HDMI port.
Can you please try to switch the homepods to 2.4Ghz network (it might improve the stability) and in Roon Audio settings make sure to enable the Compatibility Mode .
This might help you to improve stability and keep your speakers in sync.
Since I wrote the message, I found some messages about packet loss in my server-side logs. I’m considering that to be the root cause of the issue. I will try a 2.4Ghz network and observe the packet loss.
Thank you for your post. The packet loss is likely exposing a discrepancy with how Roon handles Airplay 2.
Roon is mostly compatible with Airplay 2, but the actual audio stream is still Airplay 1 (Roon relies on Airplay 2’s back-compatiblity with Airplay 1 streams).
With Airplay 1, clock sync is managed independently by each speaker. This means that the two HomePods receive distinct, parallel Airplay 1 streams and talk to Roon, not one another, to keep in sync. Each speaker handles clock sync and jitter correction with Roon by sending pulse traffic to/from RoonServer during playback. This means if one speaker encounters packet loss that is not encountered by the other, the two speakers can fall audibly out of sync.
The team has work in the pipeline to make our Airplay compatibility more reliable in these mixed-protocol setups (Airplay 1 and 2 together).
In the meantime, I recommend you take the following steps:
Try to restrict the router serving these Homepods to a single band (5.0 or 2.4GHz)
Group these HomePods outside of Roon using Apple Homekit, if you haven’t already.
Enable multicast DNS and IGMP snooping as suggested above.
I think we can close this. I will try to fix packet loss and confirm via Roon’s logs that it’s gone. If the issue persists I will open a new ticket. Thanks.
